Graham breaks with Trump on Saudi, calls for pressure on bin Salman

In a major break with US President Donald Trump, key senators in the Republican Party have pledged a tougher response to Saudi Arabia in light of the kingdom’s murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and its war on Yemen.

Senator Lindsey Graham announced Sunday that Congress needed to take action against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after a CIA assessment concluded with “high confidence” that he had ordered the hit job of Khashoggi.

Khashoggi was murdered after entering the Saudi consulate in the Turkish city of Istanbul last month. His death has led to an international diplomatic crisis, prompting calls from world leaders to hold the killers responsible.

Riyadh first tried to doge questions by offering contradictory accounts but eventually admitted that the journalist, who wrote for The Washington Post and resided in the US, was killed after refusing to return to Saudi Arabia.

Trump has cast doubt on the CIA’s report, saying MBS “maybe did” order Khashoggi’s murder or “maybe he didn’t.” He said last week that punishing the kingdom would hurt a $110bn arms deal, increase oil prices and above all, pose a threat to Israel’s existence.

The CIA report remains classified but some lawmakers have already been briefed on its contents.

“If the evidence is sufficient to conclude with high probability that [bin Salman] was complicit in this murder, then I will take steps to do a sense of the Senate resolution making that statement,” Graham, a Trump ally in Congress, told Axios on Sunday.

He implied in a separate interview with CNN that Congress was also willing to go after the “autocratic” MBS.

“Don’t think Congress is going to look away if he’s (bin Salman) making the world a more dangerous place. We are not going to give an autocratic leader a pass,” Graham told CNN. “We don’t want to give a green light to others that they can go down this road.”

The Saudi Accountability Act

Graham said he and Democratic Senator Bob Menendez were going to advocate harsher sanctions against Saudi Arabia as punishment for the murder in a resolution called the Saudi Accountability and Yemen Act.

The bill would suspend weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, ban US aircraft from refueling Saudi planes in the Yemen conflict, authorize sanctions on people responsible for Khashoggi’s death and order a report on Riyadh’s human rights record.

Washington has put sanctions on several Saudis that Riyadh claims were behind the killing. But Graham said South said he hopes to sanction bin Salman himself.

Senator Susan Collins, a more moderate GOP congress member, said it was a “grave mistake” for Trump to ignore the CIA’s assessment on the murder.

“If the President does not reconsider what actions our government should take toward the Saudi Government & MbS, Congress must act instead,” Collins tweeted on Sunday.

Republican Senator Joni Ernst took a similar stance, telling CNN Sunday that she was open to congressional action.

Members of both parties have widely criticized Trump’s decision to continue diplomatic and financial ties between the US and Saudi Arabia.

Yemen war

Lawmakers have also been more frequently criticizing Washington support for Saudi Arabia’s ongoing war on Yemen.

The Saudi-led war has destroyed Yemen’s infrastructure and led to what the international human rights monitors have called the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

So far, thousands of Yemeni women and children have been killed in the unprovoked war, which began in March 2015 to reinstate fugitive former President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a staunch Riyadh ally who stands accused of corruption.

Multiple investigations have found that weapons provided by the US, the UK and a host of other Western countries have been used to kill civilians in the impoverished country, including children.

Trump says if he halts weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, the kingdom would get closer to China and Russia.

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